New Delhi: Indian Railway engineer Ashwani Kumar Upadhyay has won the global contest organised by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Centre for Collective Intelligence for his concept idea ‘Caterpillar train’ to make possible the reach of train system to residential areas.

There were about 500 entries, but it was Ashwani’s Caterpillar concept that won both the Popular and the Judges’ Choice award.

The Caterpillar train or C-train, will have lightweight coaches with wheels on both up and down sides and will accommodate 20 passengers at a time. The train will run on elevated tracks supported by poles bent into arches. It will have a maximum speed of around 100 kmh.

Speaking about his C-train concept to the Indian Express, Ashwani said, “The strength of the concept is its simplicity and its practicability. Some ideas are very good on paper, but not practicable. I guess we won because ours was both … Currently, all urban mass transit systems are developed on the hub-and-spoke concept – the transport system is the hub and users have to travel from various parts of the city and converge there to use it. But the C-Train goes wherever there is at least a five-metre road.”

Ashwani, who is presently pursuing PhD at MIT, was posted at the Centre for Railway Information Systems in New Delhi.